Our Value
How change fails
Broadly, a firm’s responses to disruption typically fail in one or more of three ways.
Our ‘turn the corner’ methodology is designed to enable firms to navigate around these barriers to change.
Simplification
The problem may be viewed in simplistic terms: all will be fine again after we hold a town hall, train our teams in new tools, and coach the senior managers.
Isolated interventions are weak insofar as changes exist within a wider, complex organisation. Factors beyond the scope of such projects soon or late drag everyone back to square one.
Complication
Change may become complicated: the paraphernalia of top-down bureaucracy such as goals, milestones, Gantt charts, and status reports give an illusion of control yet impede meaningful progress.
The complexity of people and systems is what makes most change hard. When initiatives do not account for this, work becomes stuck on the wrong decisions and is tied up in process. Everyone quickly loses interest.
Hesitation
Where a sense of complexity exists, the risk is that change efforts become hesitant.
Questions are over-analysed; decisions go round and round in attempts to secure consensus. Committees proliferate. Management politics and personal agendas slow progress.
Organisation
Reinvigorate culture
Strengthen leadership
Enable new strategy
Manage costs or risks
Executive
Develop vision / brand
Manage stakeholders
Accelerate change
Lead diverse teams
Team
Secure cooperation
Nurture belonging
Champion diversity
Boost well-being
We align what matters
We connect and align vision, leadership, and practice, to allow everyone to make the most of productive relationships, now and into the future.
Vision
Unite and guide
Clarity of vision, at organisation, executive, and team levels allows people to unite around a shared understanding of good relationships.
Leadership
Inspire and guide
Leadership and management standards that account for the value of human relationships mean that everyone can harness this asset in day-to-day work.
Practice
Enrich and encourage
We take pains to ensure that the organisation, executives, and teams have the knowledge and tools they need to build and benefit from relationships in everyday work.
We navigate complexity
We make sense of complex questions, bring people together, and find ways forward.
Find what matters
Impartially, research and clarify the unspoken demands of diverse stakeholders.
Unravel complexity
With imagination, interpret industry trends and reconcile competing expectations.
Question thinking
Challenge the status quo, seeking a view of the future unconstrained by the past.
Talk in plain English
Speak with common sense, direct attention to key questions, and push for clear outcomes.
Secure agreement
Mindful of personal agendas, cut through office politics to secure commitment to action.
Move at pace
Deploy proven structure to get around logjams, allowing teams to act with confidence.
We care about results
What we as advisers ‘do’ is irrelevant. What matters is the benefit that a company derives from our expertise and effort. We care about your outcomes.
Value
We design outcomes to create real value for all stakeholders.
Capability
We leave people better equipped to deploy relationships at work.
Resilience
As we go along, we also strengthen the levers of change, to make future evolution easier.
We make things simple
Every situation is different, so (inevitably!) we tailor our work to fit current reality and future ambitions. We listen and talk, explore questions as they emerge, and then tackle the real issues.
Our commitment at Marble Brook is, for teams within ambitious companies, to lessen the burden and elevate the impact of change. Our off-the-shelf products are a no-nonsense way to start.